ZocDoc CEO Cyrus Massoumi on Bloomberg West

Emily Chang: This is Bloomberg West, I'm Emily Chang. Even the Obama administration admits that healthcare reform will add millions of new patients, stressing the demand for doctors, and that will make it even harder to find one that suits your needs. ZocDoc is a new company that says it can solve that problem. Founded around the same time that healthcare reform was passed, ZocDoc wants to be a kind of Open Table for doctors' appointments. Our editor-at-large, Cory Johnson, sat down with CEO Cyrus Massoumi to learn how it works.

Cory Johnson: How do you describe your company?

Cyrus Massoumi: ZocDoc is the easiest online way to find a doctor who accepts your insurance and book an appointment instantly online. (more)

Cyrus: And so there's a long period of wait time and what we try to do is completely cut that time down. People on ZocDoc can see a doctor in the next 24 hours. So with healthcare reform, there's going to be 30 million new patients and no new doctors. If you look at Massachusetts as a template, people are going to wait even longer to see a doctor. So we are helping to combat that. (more)

Cory: Let's go back to the technology. Is there a common sort of language or something that makes this possible, that all these different programs are written with or no?

Cyrus: No, and that's the hard part. We spent four years literally building all these integrations, and we've integrated with so many different systems now. And we have a team that's all they focus on, is building more of these integrations.

Cory: Now I'm sure your team is great, but your investor team is also truly some greats. Tell me about some of those people.

Cyrus: Sure. Well Khosla Ventures, Vinod Khosla and his team there, led our Series A. The Founders Fund, which is Peter Thiel and his founders, his partners, led our Series B. Jeff Bezos, Mark Benioff are also investors in us. As is Ron Conway with SV Angel. And most recently, Yuri Milner and DST came in and Goldman Sachs came in as well. So we've got, we're really psyched to have people who have changed the world behind us and help us change healthcare. (more)

Cyrus: (laughs) Yeah, well what we do talk about is the number of patients that use the site on a monthly basis and the number of available appointments. So last month, we hit about 800,000 patients who use ZocDoc to find a doctor. And we had about 5.5 million available appointments in the next 90 days. And so we're growing that number very very quickly.

Cory: Is it a regional growth strategy? Do you sort of say, we're going to do New York, we're going to do Washington, DC? Tell me.

Cyrus: Yes, so it is a regional growth strategy. We started in New York. We spent two and a half years there and now we're launching a new market every month or so. We cover about a third of the U.S. population right now, across 14 of the largest cities in America. And we just had our most recent launch, Seattle, last week and we will be announcing a new launch in the next week as well. So it's rolling really quickly.

Emily: Now Cory, with the service, can you actually see the particular doctors that you want to see? Or just doctors who are available?

Cory: Just the doctors who are available, and those may or may not be the ones that you want to see. My big take away from this company is that the healthcare in America is about to change dramatically when so many more people come into it and the ability to get appointments and see the doctors you want, and schedule those appointments will have to change. And this is a very interesting technological approach to get there. You can see that from the kinds of people backing this company.

Emily: It's an industry ripe for disruption. Alright, thanks for that Cory.